to speak, perchance to be heard

tikkun carpet

You’ve heard of tikkun olam, maybe tikkun korim, tikkun chatzot, tikkun keilim, tikkun haklali, but I don’t know if you have ever heard of this one until now. I certainly didn’t, but boy! Is it powerful!

Another title could be carpet catharsis. Same thing, but I think this is more revealing for my purposes.

Very recently, a shul that I know needed to replace its carpeting. Hmm, personification. Oh well, why not play along?

So it asked someone for help. This was someone who had started working on it a long time ago, but got pulled away from helping this poor shul. That made her very sad indeed, because she really loved helping the shul then and she really felt so frustrated that her work was not appreciated. More than that, she felt that she was dismissed with malice and this incident left a gaping hole in her heart and probably her soul. So when the shul asked her for help this time, she was so happy; she really wanted to help it and was very eager to make things right. And the shul was sooo right to ask her! What a great idea for everyone!

She knew exactly what to do and how to do it. She got working right away to help the shul be carpeted just in the perfect weave and the perfect colors. And the shul felt so relieved to finally be proud of who it was, and it could show off to everyone around, in the right way, of course.

What a tikkun.

During this period of the three weeks that we’ve just entered, when we remember all the events and attitudes that led up to the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, it’s good to have an opportunity to fix things, even as basic as this. Our problem is that we can’t just remember things, but must re-learn them, because if we remember them, we’re bound to remember them in the same way as before, which did not lead to changed behavior. So in order to really fix something, we have to scrape it down to the bottom and start over.